The use of computers to advance human disease research - known as bioinformatics -- has received a major boost from researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology (LIAI), who have used it to successfully predict immune response to one of the most complex viruses known to man - the vaccinia virus, which is used in the smallpox vaccine.
Immune responses, which are essentially how the body fights a disease-causing agent, are a crucial element of vaccine development.
"We are excited because this further validates the important role that bioinformatics can play in the development of diagnostic tools and ultimately vaccines," said Alessandro Sette, Ph.D., an internationally known vaccine expert and head of LIAI's Emerging Infectious Disease and Biodefense Center. "We've shown that it can successfully reveal - with a very high degree of accuracy -- the vast majority of the epitopes (targets) that would trigger an effective immune response against a complex pathogen."
Bioinformatics holds significant interest in the scientific community because of its potential to move scientific research forward more quickly and at less expense than traditional laboratory testing.
The findings were published this week in a paper, "A consensus epitope prediction approach identifies the breadth of murine TCD8+-cell responses to vaccinia virus," in the online version of the journal Nature Biotechnology. LIAI scientist Magdalini Moutaftsi was the lead author on the paper.
While bioinformatics - which uses computer databases, algorithms and statistical techniques to analyze biological information -- is already in use as a predictor of immune response, the LIAI research team's findings were significant because they demonstrated an extremely high rate of prediction accuracy (95 percent) in a very complex pathogen - the vaccinia virus. The vaccinia virus is a non-dangerous virus used in the smallpox vaccine because it is related to the variola virus, which is the agent of smallpox. The scientific team was able to prove the accuracy of their computer results through animal testing.
"Before, we knew that the prediction methods we were using were working, but this study proves that they work very well with a high degree of accuracy," Sette said.
The researchers focused their testing on the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), which binds to certain epitopes and is key to triggering the immune system to attack a virus-infected cell. Epitopes are pieces of a virus that the body's immune system focuses on when it begins an immune response. By understanding which epitopes will bind to the MHC molecule and cause an immune attack, scientists can use those epitopes to develop a vaccine to ward off illness - in this case to smallpox.